Most scenes in the novel achieve several things at once, developing the characters key to the complex family story while also showing the caste system and the political realities of the day. When Gandhi comes to Korampally to speak about the dangers of Hyderabad joining Pakistan, he addresses the peasant untouchables, with whom he’d lived for a while in 1934.
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
Murder, Mountain Magic, and Embracing the Weird, A Review of Alisa Alering’s Smothermoss
Alisa Alering’s debut novel Smothermoss absorbed me like a fog. Alering grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania where this book is set. From the opening pages, I felt completely immersed in the world of the mountain—its rhythms, sounds, and inexplicable mysteries.
A review of Wild Pack of the Living by Eileen Cleary
The words are sharp; they make the matter of fact description of the act of abduction feel like tearing off one’s fingernails. It would be hard to read this without holding one’s breath in fear.
Double Vision: A review of Sun Eye Moon Eye by Vincent Czyz
While there is wonderful word work throughout, Czyz’s prose really sparkles here. Like the “returnal” James Joyce, Czyz leads his readers on a merry chase through myth, literature, and art history.
A review of Beam of Light by John Kinsella
In many ways the characters of Beam of Light are cut off from themselves, but looking up at the stars (multiple light beams) or walking in the woods, they have moments, often fleeting, of self-awareness, where the individual becomes part of a collective and the pain resolves.
A review of Maze by Jennifer Juneau
Jennifer Juneau deftly plays the reader with astounding grief one minute and manic hilarity the next, sometimes both at once. It’s a cinematic maze of emotions, as in a film noir where you wonder if that lady at the playground is the kindly caregiver she appears to be or a monstrous child molester.
A review of The Book of Happiness by Joseph Mark Glazner
At its core this is a book about the entirely human path to responsibility and personal accountability. From a very early age the author parents emphasized self-sufficiency, doing him an immense favor that parents rarely bestow upon their children today.
Ghost Tones: A Review of Diane Mehta’s Tiny Extravaganzas
I found myself first reading Mehta’s poems on a sunny, hot, false summer October day and listening to my neighbor’s music that swirled up and over my fence and into my yard. It was strange music–ghostly.
A review of Wild Pack of the Living by Eileen Cleary
In this tale of humans gone wrong, and the powerful presence of the natural world as witness, the flowers do not cloy; they arrive, watch, and listen—plants accompany, then entrap. “Dog lilies and the larkspurs may have heard.” “Day lilies escort us.” “downed pines trap me.”
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